Bitly URL shortening service came up short today

PURVEYOR OF THE SHORTENED LINKS Bitly appears to be down in some places, plunging people that regularly use its service into URL long-windedness, if not total darkness.

Availability seems to to depend on where you are. Our INQUIRER remote workers, with the exception of one in the US, can all access the service, but no one in the main office can access or use the web site and its URLs.

A search on Twitter for talk about Bitly finds users asking whether it is down, along with other messages that include its working links. This suggests that the problem is not widespread, or at least, is not affecting all users. However those that rely on it are not being keen in the comments.

"The dark side of URL shorteners: When they go down, so do your links. Right now, bitly seems to be wetting the bed," says one.

The firm has started responding to messages, and according to its tests there are no problems with its systems.

It responded to complaining users, "We don't see any issues on our end. Can you let me know what ISP you're using?"

We are looking to see if we can trace the problem and will update this story with more information when we have it.

Update
Bitly is looking into the problem, and asked its users on Twitter, "Are you experiencing problems with any other websites? We're hearing reports that there are problems with Level 3."

That's what one of our remote workers sees, too. Here's a tcptraceroute log:

Tracing the path to 69.58.188.33 on TCP port 80 (www), 30 hops max
1 192.168.2.1 0.222 ms 0.066 ms 0.061 ms
2 69.3.71.165.vr9.sttnwaho-seb1.seattle.covad.com (69.3.71.165) 17.678 ms 16.695 ms 17.642 ms
3 192.168.23.93 17.122 ms 16.476 ms 16.850 ms
4 ge-5-0-102.hsa2.Seattle1.Level3.net (209.247.88.57) 17.637 ms 17.619 ms 32.583 ms
5 ae-32-52.ebr2.Seattle1.Level3.net (4.69.147.182) 17.336 ms 16.830 ms 16.801 ms
6 ae-2-2.ebr2.Denver1.Level3.net (4.69.132.54) 43.495 ms 42.822 ms 54.884 ms
7 ae-3-3.ebr1.Chicago2.Level3.net (4.69.132.62) 68.174 ms 68.422 ms 68.425 ms
8 * * *

Again, we'll update this further as we learn more.

Update 2
Indeed, as of approximately 7:45pm UTC, Bitly tweeted, "there has been an issue today with Level3 (a large Internet infrastructure provider) that is affecting bitly...". Bitly is back up now, however we can't help but imagine that some customers of Level3, and ISPs that peer with Level3, might be less than happy. µ